Workshop organizers
Günter Büren (DASMA)
Ton Dekkers (NESMA)
Thomas Fehlmann (SwiSMA)
Mauricio Aguiar (IFPUG)
Harold van Heeringen (ISBSG)
Eberhard Kranich (DASMA)
Luca Santillo (GUFPI-ISMA)
Norbert Spies (SwiSMA)
Workshop background
ICT Projects have a bad reputation: they often exceed budget or change scope. It holds especially when writing new software is involved; however, writing mobile apps, joint & distributed software development across organizations, integration of new services, sizing maintenance or ICT portfolio projects is also affected. Project management is needed but without proper estimation methods and tools it is limited to managing the budget overrun. For the economy, this is a serious blocker, since ICT is the major motor for economic growth. Work breakdown structure fails because it is part of the project to find out what work is needed; expert estimation fails because experts cannot remember previous decisions and their estimates suffer from important variations. Without proper budgeting, ICT projects carry enormous risks for the financial stability for the sponsors of an ICT project.
There have been other approaches to estimation, especially based on benchmarking within or across organizations and industries. The question arises which parameters to select for comparing different projects. Functional size is a very popular and success approach when developing new software, and definitely a major cost driver. However, quality, complexity, security requirements and other non-functional, but highly influential, parameters drive cost probably much more than functionality. Team size, distributed development, personal skills, stakeholder’s interests, and other factors influencing people, process, product, or technology, must be taken into account for estimating.
In 2010, the GUFPI-ISMA working group on Software Benchmarking Standards identified 27 parameters affecting performance of ICT projects from various sources, including ISBSG, IFPUG and COCOMO. They have the potential to improve comparability of ICT projects for benchmarks across organizations and industries; however, so far they were not adopted on an international level.
Workshop objective
This workshop shall establish a community of researchers and practitioners who are willing to share their experiences and insights for
- Using Performance Impact Factors (PIFs) for project estimation in ICT
- Refining definition for PIFs
- Understanding how to measure these factors can eventually be measured
- Setting up a framework for benchmarking based on PIFs
Participants will have an opportunity to discuss with experts the current state of the art in software and measurement methods in projects. The workshop will investigate whether an international standardization of PIFs is useful; if yes, feasible and, if yes, discuss ways how to achieve it.
Call for Papers
The organizing committee is looking for short (15’), and full (30’) contributions to the following topics:
• Estimation Models for ICT projects
• Estimation Frameworks
• Definition of PIFs
• Measurement of PIFs
• Influencing PIFs
• Benchmarking approaches
• Transition from estimates to actuals
• Measuring actuals
• Comparing estimate with actuals
• Identifying cost controls
• Transferring cost controls into actual effort
Deadlines
Please submit your paper or short presentation proposal by August 15, 2014, to thomas.fehlmann@swissict.ch.
Notification of acceptance is being expected by September 19, 2014.
MAIN website
This Workshop Proposal is a continuation of the successful workshop in Assisi October 2012
Participation
If you want to participate in this workshop, you have to register to the conference for at least the day of the workshop. If you already registered to the conference, you can attend to this workshop free of charge.
Date & time
Tuesday, October 7
10.00 – 12.30 Noordam room (B-deck)
Note! This workshop coincides with another workshop: FPA and Quality Metrics in Contracts.